


Her Body, An Apiary

by GlitchCritter



Series: persona non grata [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: ...bees?, Body Horror, Feminism, Gen, Gender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26036707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GlitchCritter/pseuds/GlitchCritter
Summary: For a woman who has given up on flesh and decided to take up beekeeping.
Series: persona non grata [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1837216
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Her Body, An Apiary

My body is devoured, piece by piece. My lovely tenants have freed me of the rotting, wet meat I used to heave around, day by day, burrowed enough holes that the absences have overwhelmed presence, and now I am rebuilt out of wax and a steady sluice of honey. Maggoty children squirm beneath, but to the unobservant I am a being of perfect structure. This is all it takes to have a body that makes my presence worthy. No one can doubt my devotion to nurturing, to the maternal, for it is me who cares for every individual drone, who whispers sweet nothings to the industrious workers as I carry them from verdant field to verdant field so they may drink their fill of watered down gold. 

Of course, I cannot speak. In my waxen sculpture, there are no vocal cords. Nothing so coarse as to be a parody of internal organs. But there are hinges so my limbs can still move, slowly, painlessly, my children understand my whims and manipulate my shell as I wish. Or maybe, though I cannot understand their white-noise hum, they are creating my thoughts, their intricate dances leaving echoes of language that I can somehow process. I am an ecosystem. I am a world. I am nothing without them. 

In the center of where my skull used to be, there is a queen. She is constantly moving, fat with power, laying egg after egg after egg after egg. She chooses their gender, you know, chooses to fertilize them herself or not. The drones are only necessary once every lifetime, to follow her to the skies and fill her with millions of sperm she will dispense over her lifetime. She returns home, stuffed, alone. The corpses of the drones crumble, intermixing with silt, far away from me. 

I find myself having to create passageways in my waxen repository, on occasion, using some sharp external object to carve out expanses, so I can dump out dead workers clogging up the comb. Their stiff bodies cascading over one another as they fall, dislodging brittle wings from their backs. I mourn, in my own way, but it is hard to grieve when there are so. so many. 

I wonder what my mother would think of me. Maybe, in the years after I left, she discovered the ecstasy of vesselment, fashioned herself into a paper mache wasp’s nest and beset her enemies with the poison of a thousands agonizing stings. Maybe she was always an apiary, and I never noticed. Maybe the reason she hated to touch me was because she worried one of her more foolish denizens would attack. Maybe she stayed silent when my father screamed to keep a swarm of fury from flowing from her mouth and devastating us all. But maybe not. It’s so hard to tell, who is a voiceless vessel, and who is simply a woman.

**Author's Note:**

> Friend who read this asked if it was based on Her Body, and Other Parties. To which I say it's likely, albeit unintentional.


End file.
